EU, Africa to focus on economic ties

Next week’s summit of leaders from the European Union and Africa is supposed to be the set-piece of a dynamic and evolving relationship, with a greater emphasis on investment and economic co-operation. Supporters of the EU’s new strategy also argue this attention to economic growth will improve the political atmosphere in a relationship complicated historically by colonialism and Africa’s need for aid.

However, even before the two-day summit gets under way in Tripoli, Libya, on 29 November, the participation of many of the 80 leaders who are supposed to attend has been thrown into doubt, especially on the European side.

The EU delegation is to be headed by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. But Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, will not be in Tripoli. A recent paper on EU-Africa relations emphasised that the EU will have to “move beyond the fragmented, development-centric approach of the past” – but the person who is in charge of ensuring coherence between the EU’s foreign and development policies will be absent.

Another notable absentee from the summit will be Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, and therefore in charge of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs).

For many countries in Africa, EPAs are the most controversial elements of the EU’s policy towards Africa, but they will not feature on the agenda.

“Major issues have been evacuated from the agenda,” an observer said. “This summit will not be judged by its substance but by its feel-good factor.”

The United Kingdom is sending a junior minister to the summit because it fears that Omar al-Bashir – Sudan’s leader, indicted for war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court – might show up. It also wants to avoid any senior-level contact with Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s autocratic president. Other European governments might follow the UK’s lead – provoking one source to lament that the summit “should not be a meeting between African heads of state and EU foreign ministers”.

Closer ties

Fact File

Africa and the EEAS

The EU-Africa summit is taking place just before the EU launches its new diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service. The country desks dealing with the poorest nations, which are currently located in the European Commission’s department for development, will move on 1 January into the new service, but it is not yet clear whether the unit dealing with pan-African issues, governance and migration will also be transferred, or remain with the Commission.

At a more general level, “it remains to be seen if development issues are sufficiently taken into account in setting up the European External Action Service”, according to Andrew Sherriff, who follows EU-Africa relations at the European Centre for Development Policy Management in Maastricht. Sherriff said that there was still some “tentativeness” on the European side as to who should lead on Africa. Policy coherence for development “has not yet reached the political level that is really required”, he said.

Politics and development

The new communication on EU-Africa relations raises the question of whether the EU is ready to let go of the potential political influence that its development aid could buy in Africa.

The paper’s analysis of ‘lessons learnt’ from the current joint strategy, adopted in 2007, discusses the need to overcome “competing national interests”, “unco-ordinated bilateral initiatives” and “lack of co-ordination between instruments” on the EU side – not because these create bad development outcomes on the ground, but because they “undermine visibility and political traction”.

The strategy goes on to state that the EU will “continue to engage with its African partners to secure the adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution that would allow the new EU representatives, in accordance with the Treaty of Lisbon, to participate effectively in the work of the UN General Assembly”. Developing countries voted to delay such a resolution in September, thereby preventing Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, from addressing the assembly. Many diplomats asked why countries that received a large share of development funding from the EU had, in effect, voted against the EU. But is this really an issue of such strategic significance that it should figure in the EU’s long-term strategy for relations with Africa?

The EU representatives will come to the summit with the recently agreed outlines of a new EU strategy for relations with Africa, widely regarded as a useful basis on which to start serious work on re-defining the relationship.

Drawn up by Andris Piebalgs, the European commissioner for development (who will be in Tripoli, along with fellow commissioner Antonio Tajani, responsible for industry), the strategy reaffirms the importance of the Millennium Development Goals for the relationship, but also calls for a more comprehensive approach.

“There is a need to support Africa in strengthening its political and economic governance, and in reinforcing the regulatory, fiscal and business environment that allows better mobilising of the continent’s own assets in a sustainable way,” the paper says. That chimes with the EU-Africa’s summit theme of “growth, investment and job creation”. Diplomats are crediting Piebalgs with a genuine will to move this initiative forward.

Mahmoud Mohieldin, a former investment minister of Egypt, who joined the World Bank as a managing director last month, welcomed the abandonment of the “interventionist ways of the past”. He stressed the importance of letting poor countries take the lead in setting their own development priorities for funding by donors, often through direct transfers into their treasuries (a mechanism known as ‘budget support’).